Missing owner of wallet with $10K check found

Finally, the mystery is solved. The owner of a wallet found on a city bus with a $10,000 cashier’s check inside, showed up the other day to claim it — a year after he had called to say he was on his way.

After several fruitless attempts to locate Robert Lee Mader, the missing owner of the billfold, Shelley Duncanson, of Metropolitan Transit, had reached out to me to try to track him down.

The North Park address on the state-issued I.D. in his wallet was nonexistent. Plus, several Internet search leads turned into dead ends. There was no record, however, of Mader having died.

Detective work by local readers turned up several more clues. But, in the end, it was a North Park acquaintance of Mader, 55, who told him she had read about his missing billfold.

Mader told Duncanson the rest of his story. “He remembered losing his wallet, calling us about it and boarding a bus to come pick it up,” Duncanson recounts, but he didn’t recall what happened after that. Apparently Mader suffered the first of a series of strokes en route to the transit office and was hospitalized for several weeks.